3 ms·

"Substantial similarity" can result in a copyright violation? How is it possible there is more than one cookbook describing how to make a peanut-butter-and-jell

• bboreham 10y ago
  "Copyright law does not protect recipes that are mere listings of ingredients." "Copyright protection may, however, extend to substantial literary expression—a description, explanation, or illustration, for example—that accompanies a recipe" https://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html https://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html
• rayiner 10y ago
  "Even in the absence of verbatim copying, a copyright owner may show infringement by showing that the infringer had access to the work and that the two works are substantially similar." Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of Am. Inc., 975 F.2d 832, 844 (Fed. Cir. 1992). "This doctrine prevents a plagiarist from escaping infringement by making immaterial changes in the protected work." Id. To answer your question, then, the reason is that this doctrine only kicks in when the accused infringer had access to the original code. (I have, in fact, seen cases where it was pretty obvious that someone had just taken code from an SDK or something similar and just changed the variable names.)